In the digital age, organizations increasingly rely on digitally-stored data. To protect against data loss, an organization may use a backup system to back up important data. In some cases, an organization may handle and store data via virtual machines. Accordingly, a backup system may back up a virtual machine disk image to preserve data handled by a virtual machine.
Due to increasingly complex information technology infrastructures, an organization may wish to apply differing storage lifecycle policies to various backups. Traditionally, backup administrators charged with creating backups of physical servers have manually configured backup jobs, assigning storage lifecycle policies to each backup job as appropriate. With the proliferation of virtual machines, many backup administrators may configure backup jobs to protect containers for virtual machines. As virtual machines dynamically exit and/or enter these containers, traditional lifecycle management approaches for virtual machine data may fail to account for what type of data is stored by each virtual machine. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies additional and improved systems and methods for applying storage lifecycle policies to backups.